Posts tagged with: economic conservative

David Brooks recently took on the conservative movement for relying too heavily on pro-market arguments and tired formulas rather than emphasizing its historic features of custom, social harmony, and moral preservation.

As I’ve already noted in response to the Brooks piece, I agree that conservatism needs a renewed intellectual foundation brought about by a return to these emphases, yet I disagree that a lopsided devotion to “economic freedom” is what’s stalling us. If we hope to restore traditionalist conservatism, we’d do well to recognize that this means restoring economic conservatism along with it. Brooks is upset that dogmatic pro-market folks have seized the Republican Party, yet this is the same Republican Party that nominated the architect of Romneycare and can’t seem to get serious about the deficit.

Conservatism is faltering all around, and the reasons for each “sect’s” demise are more or less interrelated. As I’ve written elsewhere, we need to restore a holistic conservative imagination that ties its social and economic strains together by grounding them both in Russell Kirk’s “enduring moral order.”

For David Brooks, restoration is all about “balance,” but for the true conservative, it needs to be about integration.(more…)

Former Acton Research fellow Jay Richards’ new co-authored book, Indivisible, has climbed onto The New York Times Bestseller list, holding onto a top ten spot for a second week. The book was published by FaithWords and, in an interesting cross-publishing arrangement, is also available in an Ignatius press edition with a foreword by Ignatius founder Fr. Joseph Fessio. Jay’s co-author, James Robison, is the co-host of the evangelical daily show LIFE Today.

If you’ve had the chance to hear Jay speak, or read his earlier book, Money, Greed, and God, you’ll recognize Jay’s dry wit in several places. Here’s an example of the prose style that makes the book so much fun to read (in a section on global warming):

Effect and cause—the warming and the cause of the warming—are two different things. This is a point of logic, not science. Retreating glaciers in Alaska, polar bears looking mournfully at the ocean from the edge of a chunk of sea ice, shorter winters year after year, may be evidence of warming, but can’t tell us why the earth has warmed.

The book is a high-flying overview, so it touches on everything from creation stewardship to economic freedom to the role of the family in maintaining a free society. Its organizing message is that economic and social conservatism reinforce each other in important ways that are often overlooked.

Here’s the book endorsement from Fr.Sirico:

It is relatively easy to observe that our society is fast reaching a climactic moment. How to discern a wise, credible, effective, and prudent course of action to avoid disaster is not easy to come across. Jay Richards and James Robison make an important contribution in pointing the way to avoid the worst effects of a coming cultural and economic tsunami. (Rev. Robert A. Sirico, President, Acton Institute)